So  Mashable reports that Facebook, the animal that launched a pretty good movie and an uninspired IPO that made a peculiar kid incredibly wealthy, reads your chats. And this surprises people?

The screening process begins with scanning software that monitors chats for words or phrases that signal something might be amiss, such as an exchange of personal information or vulgar language.

The software pays more attention to chats between users who don’t already have a well-established connection on the site and whose profile data indicate something may be wrong, such as a wide age gap. The scanning program is also “smart” — it’s taught to keep an eye out for certain phrases found in the previously obtained chat records from criminals including sexual predators.

If the scanning software flags a suspicious chat exchange, it notifies Facebook security employees, who can then determine if police should be notified.

Privacy and Facebook are often mentioned in the same sentence, and not in a good way.  Initially, people somehow forget that it started as a means of public dissemination of information, images and insults. This was the promise of social media, and it was meant to be social.  Nobody promised you a personal, private place for promiscuous peccadillos.

Remember MySpace?  It was the leader in the space before Facebook suddenly appeared, and quickly devolved into a cesspool of child predators. Parents clamped down on their children’s newfound bestest friends, ordering their children to delete their page and trust no one.  That adults seeking children would flock there was no surprise. Same reason as why Willie Sutton robbed banks.

But Facebook never made any pretense of caring about your privacy.  It doesn’t charge you to use it, and had to monetize itself somehow, using whatever nuggets you gave it to sell to marketers. And you knew this. You did.

It may feel as if you own your Facebook page, with some inherent right to control not only your fate, but your personal information, but only the most foolish were unaware of the business model.  That we now learn that someone developed algorithms to detect bad things happening should come as no surprise.  It may feel like ours, but Mark Zuckerberg just lets us hang out there as long as we don’t piss him off. 

The explanation is neither hard to deduce nor hard to appreciate.  Facebook doesn’t want to suffer the same fate as MySpace, or become a facilitator for the worst the internet has to offer.

Facebook works with law enforcement “where appropriate and to the extent required by law to ensure the safety of the people who use Facebook,” according to a page on its site.

“We may disclose information pursuant to subpoenas, court orders, or other requests (including criminal and civil matters) if we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law. This may include respecting requests from jurisdictions outside of the United States where we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law under the local laws in that jurisdiction, apply to users from that jurisdiction, and are consistent with generally accepted international standards.

“We may also share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to prevent fraud or other illegal activity, to prevent imminent bodily harm, or to protect ourselves and you from people violating our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, courts or other government entities.”

While people seem to forsake privacy on the internet in the hope of public adoration and the chance to become the next Justin Bieber (or maybe just get a date), they simultaneously want to believe that they can pick and choose what’s public and what’s entirely their own at their convenience.  Facebook never told you that was the case. In fact, Facebook has always been pretty open about the fact that your use of their facilities left you at their mercy.

While the “do it for the children” rationale tends to conveniently justify pretty much everything these days, the issues that persist when it’s used to back a law are very different than when a private entity decides that it would rather not take a risk.  Facebook is a corporation, not a government entitlement program.  It gets to make its own choices as to what it allows to go unnoticed. And noticed. We’re just guests in their home.

The hard message is that nobody makes you set up a Facebook page. Nobody forces you to put that drunk picture online, or update your status that you just robbed a bank.  And certainly, nobody promised that you can troll for children, or loose women, or drugs, or contract killers, without anybody noticing.

Not surprisingly, Facebook has the technological know-how to accomplish its purpose in a relatively unobtrusive way.

When asked for a comment, Facebook only repeated the remarks given by Sullivan to Reuters: “We’ve never wanted to set up an environment where we have employees looking at private communications, so it’s really important that we use technology that has a very low false-positive rate.”

You have to say something that sets off alarms before an actual person takes a look. Don’t want anybody looking? Then don’t say anything that would be sufficiently compelling to a computer program that it comes off as pretty bad or dangerous.  Or if you can’t control your impulses to that extent, do use Facebook.  Or if you can’t manage to exist without being an integral part of social media, pretend your Zuckerberg and come up with your own alternative.

But you don’t have a right to enjoy the largesse of a private entity, use its facilities, be part of its fun, while expecting that it doesn’t have the authority to keep its house clean.  And just so you know, anybody stupid enough to believe that one can enjoy the wonders of social media while maintaining privacy is fooling themselves.  It was never private, and never meant to be private. If you want to keep your personal information, your conversations, to yourself, take a walk and have a nice chat face to face rather than Facebook to Facebook.  Your privacy is your business, not Facebook’s.